1. Field of the Invention
The invention is generally related to the area of man machine interface. In particular, the invention is related to method and apparatus for editing a list of items without using the drag and drop utility.
2. The Background of Related Art
The desire of enjoying multimedia productions such as music audio or video has been growing along with the advance of technologies in the consumer electronics industry. With the proliferation of the digital multimedia, a user can easily possess a large collection of audio or video files. One of the preferable ways to listen to or view these files is to play the files in accordance with a playlist. The playlist is an ordered list of a group of multimedia items. A player can play all items in the playlist, one after another in a certain order. In general, a user would create a playlist suited for his/her personal preference. Using a playlist, a person can choose only the audios or videos he/she likes and skip over others. For example, a person likes only to listen to a couple of tracks in an album including many tracks, or a particular album or few audio tracks from a selected artist. A playlist can be helpful and used to organize the selected items and skip over those unselected without further interventions from a user.
Editing such a playlist or queue on a personal computer can be readily achieved. After selecting an item in a queue with a pointing device (e.g., a mouse), a user may delete the item from the queue or move the item to a different location in the queue. However, when a device is not equipped with a pointing device, editing a queue becomes a challenge. For example, a queue is commonly used in an Apple iPod®. A scroll wheel of an iPod® allows a user to scroll a queue but is difficult to manage the queue, such as adding a number of songs to be played right after a particular song or moving a song from one position in the queue to another position in the queue. Another example is a digital camera with a display screen that shows a list of photos. A display of some or all of the photos on the display screen is generally in sequence, causing an exposure of some photos that are not meant for display. However, rearrangement of these photos for a pertinent display is a challenge because many digital cameras are not equipped with a pointing device to drag and drop a photo.
There is, thus, a need for mechanisms that can move an item or a group of items in a queue/playlist without having the luxury of an external controller (e.g., a mouse, a joystick, etc.) to select and move the items around. Such mechanisms would be especially useful for small portable devices that have simple interfaces such as a scroll or click-wheel and one or more keys or buttons.